We Don’t Need Better Athletes. We Need a Better System

What the World Cup revealed about the youth sports system - and how New Orleans can build something better.

An opinion editorial written by Lowrey Crews, Founder and CEO of The 18th Ward

I enjoy watching sports year-round, but there’s something magical about the World Cup. It combines athleticism, controversy, economics, geography, hope, politics, and so much more.

Leading up to this year’s tournament, I got my whole family educated and excited by watching documentaries like ESPN’s The 99ers, Fox Sports’ Summer of ’94, HBO’s Us Against the World, and we even went further down the rabbit hole with You Don’t Know Where I’m From, Dawg on Paramount+.

Once the United States Men’s National Team lost to Belgium, I started to receive countless emails, text messages, and articles from former teammates, current coaches, and families with kids who play soccer. Most of us agree on one thing: the youth soccer system is broken. Here are my biggest reflections post World Cup.

The problems in our youth system aren’t unique to soccer. More kids should be playing all sports, and the systems we’ve built in the United States often produce the opposite result. Boys participate at higher rates than girls. Children from wealthier families have far more opportunities than their peers. Fewer than one in four young people get enough daily physical activity, and most children quit organized sports before they reach high school. We could improve youth soccer, but we’d serve far more kids by fixing the broader youth sports ecosystem.

We’re all responsible for this broken youth system. Travel teams have become prohibitively expensive, and most promise more than they deliver. Nonprofit programs usually start off strong because of good intentions and startup funding, but they will struggle to sustain themselves without raising prices on families. Public recreation departments often operate on autopilot, and receive similar funding each year regardless of outcomes. School athletic departments rarely use data to maximize participation opportunities. The resulting youth sports system resembles a pyramid with wide participation at ages four and five, followed by steep attrition every year after. By the time students reach high school, most schools have only a small fraction of their student body still participating in sports.

Great athletes are usually the byproduct of a great system, but a great system should not be designed primarily to produce professional athletes. Its primary goals should be participation, retention, physical health, and the lifelong skills sports can teach us: communication, confidence, resilience, and teamwork to name a few. If organizations want to reach these outcomes, they need low barriers to access and great coaches. They should observe practices and games to see if kids are having fun and showing improvement rather than determine their success by who gets drafted and how many trophies they won.

Money matters, and how organizations spend it matters even more. Someone has to invest in a better system. Philanthropists should support scalable solutions rather than isolated programs. Travel organizations should find ways to reduce family costs because paying more doesn’t guarantee better outcomes. Schools should bring back intramural sports and can work with nonprofit organizations to deliver these programs. Recreation departments should ensure that resources support programming, not just facilities and administrative overhead.

The youth sports system we’ve created is a problem. It’s solvable too. If we want a better system, all of the youth program providers need to collaborate. Collective responsibility leads to collective impact, and our city has a great opportunity to create a better youth system as we search for the next CEO of the New Orleans Recreation Department (NORD). Our city needs a great leader to generate political will, inspire philanthropic resources, and ensure youth program leaders across the city operate without egos or ulterior motives. If we get this right, we’ll produce not only better athletes, but a healthier community as well.